31 thoughts on “Manual Transmissions”

    1. True. Having to drive through LA traffic with a stick is hell. OTOH, you will have difficulty buying stick shifts soon. I bought a Nissan Z sports car with a stick – because sports diving for me is also finding your own shift points. Previously, the stick version of the any car saved you the money of buying the more complex automatic, but no more. The model with the stick was the most expensive version and several top end sports cars – the new mid engine Corvette and the Toyota Supra are not even available with a stick.

      1. I’ve been driving a stick in LA for decades. It’s so second nature that I don’t even think about it. On the other hand, I haven’t had to regularly commute in decades…

        2. Believe me, it’s murder to commute on the LA freeways from someplace with decently priced and livable housing to Boeing or Raytheon in El Segundo on a daily basis is brutal. Used up two manual transmissions not to mention ending up with a case of clutch pusher’s sore knee every couple of months.

      2. The low-end Nissan Versa is available with stick, which will save you about $2K over the automatic. Get the sedan instead of the 5-door and that’s another $1K saved. You still see new ones on clearance sale for $12K or so.

  2. Same thing happened to me in South Dallas last year – a couple of punks came up to my car, waved a gun in my face and told me to get out. I could tell the gun was fake, but decided to have some fun with them, and so let them get in the car. I was mocking them the whole time, but I don’t think they realized it in their “living the GTA lifestyle” fugue. After a minute of watching the driver jiggle the gearshift and mutter “go, go!”, I said “guys, you don’t know how to drive a manual transmission.” I got to laugh as they just walked away. Idjits.

    However, I drive manuals to stay focused on the driving environment. You’ll never catch me on the phone when I’m driving. My personal feeling is that automatics encourage sloppy and even dangerous driving behaviours.

      1. Of course the same could be said for cruise control, tilt wheel, GPS navigation, and the entertainment center in the dash. Careless people are going to be with whatever they are using. Drove a stick only for decades, no nostalgia.

          1. “Automatic is for Commies and it’s no accident “robot” is a Slavic word…”

            Hence the push toward “self-driving cars”. Imagine a future when the guv could shut down all consumer “operated” cars by declaring some state of emergency. Your self-driving cars locks up until the guv says otherwise. Also they would completely control/know everywhere you go etc.

          2. Or on different subject consider Elizabeth Warren (& Bernie Saunders) “wealth tax”. Since the majority of the stock shares are held by the super-wealthy like Gates/Bezos etc. the tax would hit them harder. After all if they had to massively sell shares to pay the tax wouldn’t the share price collapse? It might even be a net tax loss for the government considering capital loss tax right off they would get. Suppose though that Saunders/Warren know this? What if they have a caveat; you can pay the tax not by selling shares but by signing them over to the Government instead. The guv doesn’t sell the signed over shares (for the most part) merely accumulates them. After awhile wouldn’t the federal government have controlling interest in most of the fortune 500 companies? Unless there is some law against the government owing stock in private companies? In effect Communism (state control of the private sector) by legal means?

          4. A Schwinn Meriadian would be a godo choice. It’s only a one-speed so there’s less useless technology to fail. Best of all, when you’re waiting in your motionless automatic car for the Volkspolizei to pick you up, I can pedal off on my tricycle, secure in the knowlege if the VoPos come after me, *their* automatic pilot will stop them from chasing me, since a tricycle is the moral equivalent of a pedestrian…

  3. Caught the manual transmission bug from my Dad. I am 60 years old every car I have ever owned has been a manual transmission with one exception, my first car. However I am looking to replace my current 2008 Honda Accord coupe manual transmission with a (horrors) automatic transmission. Liking the new 2021 Toyota PHEV RAV4. If I follow through it would be my first auto since HS

      1. Don’t know if an automatic transmission can “jam”, but I do know that it can “fail to cycle” (not shift, not engage in gear, slip badly, shift abruptly).

        There are also failure modes of the manual transmission setup, but mainly having to do with the clutch plate or clutch activation.

      2. Decades ago, yes. Now, no. And I also spent too much time on linkage jams and replacing clutches back when.

        1. I had to deal with a CVT failure a couple of years ago. It was impossible to tell what was actually wrong, since it returned hundreds of conflicting error codes. When I took off the oil pan, it turned out the oil pickup screen had fouled, and *that* failed the squirtgun.

    3. Why is a single-action obsolete? I would think that it is easier to shoot accurately because you don’t have the trigger pull making so many things happen in the weapon.

      A semi-auto also has less happening on the trigger pull because the weapon “cycles” after the round discharges. The semi-auto can have problems with not cycling and jamming if the gun isn’t in top condition. Then there is the Webley revolver, a British invention that if memory serves me is supposed to function more like a semi-automatic. I heard that this is a heavy, clunky solution.

      To say that a single-action revolver is obsolete is to say that a bolt-action rifle is also obsolete? A breakdown shotgun?

      1. If you’ve watched “Hell On Wheels,” you can make an argument that the cap and ball revolver isn’t obsolete either. Reload in a firefight is like swapping out a magazine, rather than fiddling with a handful of cartridges. If you’ve got ten loaded cylinders in your pockets, and you’ve practiced the swap-out…

      3. I had thought Obsolescent meant “technically surpassed but still functional”. Looking the word up today, dictionaries say that it is almost synonymous with Obsolete. Maybe the dictionary I had consulted decades ago was obsolescent.

  6. Had a hard time getting my car with a manual when I bought it in the LA area in ’06. The salesdweebs were openly astonished that anyone would want a standard. The first time I had to go into LA and deal with stop-and-go traffic for two hours straight I learned why – major cramping in my left leg after the first hour from the constant clutch work.

    Auto also makes some sense if you expect to be doing a modest amount of rough dirt road driving. (If you’re going to be doing a lot, get a proper 4wd with low-range.) The torque converter gives you a little more on the crawl end without having to constantly slip the clutch.

    Those niche cases aside, yeah, I like a car that does what I tell it to when I tell it to. And MT is just one part of that these days – more and more when I rent a car in recent years, I spend the first hour figuring out how to shut down all the whiz-bang “smart” features that are trying to kill me, lane-hold and such.

    1. They’ve even managed to muck up manuals. On my 2017 Impreza base model, you can’t slip the clutch effectively because the ECM is equipped with something called “hill assist” that can’t be turned off. Fortunately, I still have a 2001 Ranger you can still drive like a real car. I do have a 2018 CrossTrek Premium (outside North America, that’s an Impreza XV) with CVT and various bells and whistles. Once you disengage posi-track, then engage X-mode and switch to Manual mode on the transmission shifter (meaning those paddle thingies), you couldn’t get stuck in mud or deep snow unless you managed to hang it up on a boulder.

  7. This discussion made me remember back in the 1970s helping a buddy work on a 1920 vintage car (memory suggests a Model T, but it’s been 40+ years, so I don’t remember). I was amazed to discover it had to be oiled manually. There was an oil can mounted under the hood. If you started to hear tappet noise, you had to get out and oil the engine by hand.

  8. Final pedantic note for this comment thread as it fades away:

    The Latin root of Obsolete, obsoletus, means “worn out.” The root of Obsolescent, obsolesco, means “to go out of use.” It’s a subtle but meaningful difference. Obsolescent means roughly the same thing as Deprecated to us software types. I never thought deprecation was a good idea because it breaks legacy code unnecessarily. On the other hand, the last years of my career were spent being paid handsomely to update deliberately broken legacy code.

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